Main cast: Keegan Connor Tracy (Beth), Jett Klyne (Joshua), Sean Rogerson (Kevin), Sara Canning (Jenna), Stephen McHattie (Dr Seager), Chandra West (Georgia), and Ali Webb (Mrs Hirsch)
Director: Brandon Christensen

Z is another one of those “a couple with a creepy kid, living in a big house” horror stories that are saturating the market. I know, these movies are pretty cheap to make because the bulk of the budget likely goes to the cast and the rental of the big house to film the movie. If done well, the movie would be praised as high suspenseful supernatural drama. Otherwise… well, I’m sure a streaming service somewhere will have a slot that desperately needs filling by anything with a runtime. This movie is more of the latter.

Here, we have a couple, Beth and Kevin, that indulge their kid Kevin to such a degree that they prepare an extra plate of food during meals for Kevin’s imaginary friend, the Z of the movie title. Unfortunately, such indulgence doesn’t seem to be working, as far from having a great shared experience between parents and kids like those shrinks would say, Beth and Kevin find their kid getting into increasingly problematic behavior at school. Kevin insists that he’s just doing what Z tells him to do. So… is this Z real, or just a product of a kid’s active imagination?

Well, maybe the smarter thing director and co-screenwriter Brandon Christensen could have done is to perhaps subvert the tropes of such movies and present a twist that make me think that this movie isn’t just one of the many generic made-of-jump-scares movies out there. What he has done here, instead, is to assemble an actually decent cast and waste all the money paid to these actors by making them act out a long-drawn, boring, and generic script.

Yes, here’s yet another scene of Beth walking slowly along a darkly-lit corridor to slowly open a locked door – boo! Oh look, another similar scene, and she’s opening the door slowly – boo again! Let’s do it one more time, and one more time, because I guess these folks are trying to turn me into one of Pavlov’s dogs, to instantly jump and scream each time someone opens a door. This and the repetitive use of other tired, done-to-death gimmicks of such movies only make Z another boring, formulaic tripe that is more focused on throwing jump scares and darkly-lit scenes at me than to actually tell an interesting story.

It also tries to create some rules for Z only to of course break these rules for the predictable “the monster is not dead yet… now give these people money to make a sequel, thanks” ending scene. Oj, and let’s not forget the hideous CGI for Z.

As I’ve mentioned, the cast is decent, and even Jett Klyne—currently seen on WandaVision as one of Wanda’s creepy kids—is actually watchable and even engaging at times. Maybe they should have trimmed the cast and used the money saved up to buy a better script and get a less generic director.